| OCR Text |
Show 140 sky sailed by white clouds, the shimmer of sun upon the broad Atlantic, the ever green Florida coast, and lover-like I wanted to exclaim: "0, my America, my new found land!" I felt like John Donne; all I lacked were the words. I loved it high there in the cool clear air, roaches and regrets and hangovers left far below. I loved the control of flying, of my command of the powerful machine down to each whisper of its obedient wings. I loved the freedom of it, the exhilaration of speed and the release from an earth where man walks upright but with fallen arches and crooked spines and sagging guts, lifting his feet from the stick of gravity like flies loosely fixed upon a glue-paper trap. And most of all I loved the potency of it, my left hand closed upon the mighty throttle, the fingers of my right hand softly lightly curled to the stick to command both the power and the speed, with the little black button wired up to wing guns commanding life and death. Oh yes, with such control and freedom and power I felt as if I had realized all men's aspiration to transcend their stooped huddle against an earth which bears them and the next instant opens and draws them back into a desert of unmarked unknown graves. I felt as if I flew for life, sitting there on deadly wings. I knew one thing, I needed some kind of lift, some plane or horse or book or person to lift me, some song, I could not do it alone. Neither could Daedalus. Yet on bad days flying made me sweat with terror. I looked at the remains of a crashed fighter which had been shoveled onto the back of a Navy truck, the guy had spun in like Icarus, and now metal and earth and guts and bone were inextricably mingled, the smell of burned flesh hovering over it all. I saw it and smelled it and resented it fiercely. I had seen the guy the day before in the BOQ, singing naked in the shower, and for the pale horse to crop so obviously in Paradise was shocking, an affront. Death was a vulgar, |
